“I was in the process of hiring a second secretary to help with the reports when I discovered Dragon. I don’t need to hire another person now. I have time to do all my own documents. A report that used to take me around 30 minutes can now be done in 30 seconds.  Instead of sitting in the surgery for a couple of hours keyboarding, I am freed up to do other work. I am finding it extremely cost and time effective.”

                                                                                              GP Dr Yasser Faki, Dublin

"Combining voice recognition with digital dictation has transformed our office and greatly increased the amount of work we are able to handle"

                                                                Stephen Ahern, Ahern O'Shea Solicitors, College Green, Dublin

I’ve dealt with voice recognition technology in the past, focusing particularly on Via Voice from IBM. The reason for this was simple. I use a Mac, and Via Voice, at the time, was the only dictation recognition product avail-able for the Mac. Since then there have been changes. Notably, MacSpeech has come out with a voice recognition product (I haven't been sent me a review copy yet), and IBM has handed the sales and marketing of Via Voice over to another company called Scansoft.

Scansoft is a leader in voice and text recognition. In addition to Via Voice, it also markets Dragon Naturally Speaking. Naturally Speaking has had a chequered life. Dragon Systems, Naturally Speaking's developer, was acquired by renowned Belgian software company Lernout & Hauspie in 2000. However, within a matter of months, Lernout & Hauspie was in serious financial trouble following revelations of misdeeds in its

Korean operation. The directors eventually ended up in jail, and L&H's assets were sold. Scansoft ended up with L&H's speech recognition portfolio, including Dragon Naturally Speaking.

So where's all this leading, you may ask. Well it’s leading to Parkwest in Dublin and the new offices of Medicom — developers of the practice management system Dynamic GP.

Mr Howard Beggs, Medicom's CEO, got in touch a few weeks ago to let me know that his company was about to release a new version of Dynamic GP with integrated voice recognition using Dragon Naturally Speaking. Intrigued at this latest development, I made my way round to the Medicom offices where I met up with Mr Beggs and Mr Vincent Ryan from Computerspeak, the Dublin-based company that provided the software and hardware.

The aim of including voice recognition is to liberate GPs and consultants, especially consultants, from the key-board, explained Mr Beggs. So far the cardiology room in the Mater Private Hospital is trialing the system with seven consultants.

There are two ways of using the system — either a micro-phone connected directly to the PC running Dynamic GP, or via a digital dictaphone. Mr Ryan demonstrated a nifty little gadget from Philips that integrated a trackball — which performs the same functions as a mouse — into the microphone, along with stop, start, rewind, etc. buttons.

The interesting thing is that the digital dictaphones (again Mr Ryan had some samples handy, one from Philips and the other from Olympus) can double up as controllers/microphones for direct input. However, Mr Beggs envisages consultants dictating their notes into a digital Dictaphone, in much the same way they do today into a tape-based device, and then handing it to their secretary who then hooks it up to the PC and runs the software. The consultant's voice is converted to text and all the secretary has to do is proofread it.

There is some training to do, but out of the box the accuracy is still quite good. Both Ryan and Beggs took me through a five-minute training session. Now, when I say training, I mean that the software had to be trained to recognize my voice. This involved reading a text displayed on the screen. Now, I could have sworn that the software was worse at recognizing my voice after the training session, but it was explained to me that this is in fact normal. It is really only after a few training sessions that the accuracy gets into the high 90 per cent range. And as the user corrects the mistakes the software makes, it learns, pushing the accuracy even higher.

It is possible to have several people who use the same machine train the software to recognize their voice, so in a practice where several doctors might dictate letters into a digital dictaphone, the sec­retary can convert them all using a single PC.

Medicom has obviously integrated the software so that users can fill in fields in Dynamic GP with their voice, but that's not all it can do. Users can dictate letters directly into other programs like Microsoft Word. And Dragon Naturally Speaking can also be used for command and control func­tions, so you can dictate your session notes, then tell Dynamic GP to 'save', open a new session, and so on. You can also tell your PC to e-mail a file to a particular person. There is really very little you can't do with voice recognition.

So how much does it cost? According to Mr Beggs, voice recognition will be available in the next release of Dynamic GP for €900 per voice. "People may think that's expensive," added Mr Beggs. "After all, you can buy a stand-alone copy of Dragon Naturally Speaking for much less on-line. However, that is just the standard version, and does not include the special­ized dictionaries we have created. And the standard version does not integrate with Dynamic GP."

David Steward can be contacted at e-mail:
edoctor@eireannpublications.ie

18 FEBRUARY 2004

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